J.A. White – Middle Grade Horror
This is the sequel to Nightbooks, a chilling middle-grade horror about a boy trapped in an apartment and forced to write scary stories for a witch. I loved the original, but I was a little surprised to see another entry. The story had been wrapped up so well. Why was there a sequel? Where else was there to go?
Well, in regards to the first question: there was a movie. Which suggests that this might be one of those surprise duologies whose second book arrived to ride a wave of adaptation-fueled interest, like Adam Rex’s Smek for President! and Lois Lowry’s The Willoughbys Return. That’s maybe not the easiest thing to write (even if it’s a good problem to have) which could be why this book, even more than the first one, is a meditation on the struggles and rewards of creative process.
Protagonist Alex is trapped again, this time in a dream of his “idea graveyard,” a vast cemetery where every story idea he’s ever had and didn’t use is buried. In order to escape, he’ll have to unearth and finish every one (a premise that’s enough to strike fear into the heart of any writer.) There’s a parallel investigation going on in the real world, and some friendship drama between him and Yasmin, Alex’s fellow abductee from the first book. I appreciated that this one actually addressed that being kidnapped by a witch for weeks and unable to tell anyone about it would probably not be something you go through without some lingering mental scars that would affect your relationships.
But the highlight here is Alex’s stories themselves. The reader follows his writing process as he exhumes old ideas, works out why they never quite germinated the first time, fixes them, and turn them into finished pieces, which we then get to read. It’s a lesson on how to develop engaging plots and twists in the form of a narrative, something that will be valuable to budding writers. And the finished stories are a delight—even the first, intentionally underwhelming one has a goofy Goosebumps charm, and later entries are genuinely spine-tingling.
Dig this one up at your local library or on Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon!
Steph Cherrywell 